Israel, Arabs, and the Family of God

Last Sunday, I met an Arab Christian who was visiting our church. In a respectful way, he poured out his heart concerning the plight of his people in the Middle East and his sadness at how few American Christian pastors ever say anything positive or hopeful about Arab Christians...

So I thought it would be good to publicly affirm a few positions that I think the Bible mandates:

- True Christians are citizens of the kingdom of Jesus Christ first, and only secondarily citizens of any earthly nation or state.

- American Christians are more closely united to Palestinian Christians and Arab Christians and Jewish Christians throughout the world than we are to the state of non-Christian Israel.

- Israel was chosen by God from all the peoples of the world to be the focus of special blessing in the history of redemption, which climaxed in Jesus Christ, the Messiah.

- God has saving purposes for ethnic Israel (Romans 11:25–26), as he does for the Arab nations (Isaiah 19:19–25; Psalm 22:27; Matthew 28:19–20; Romans 3:29–30).

- The Christian plea in the Middle East to Palestinians and Jews is: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). This is the path to peace. “Jesus himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14).

- Therefore, all Christians, especially Christian pastors, should speak openly and joyfully of our unity with Arab and Jewish Christians...

You conveniently skipped over these from your excerpt

Deceitful..
But hey, that’s one way to live.
.......

God promised to Israel the presently disputed land from the time of Abraham onward. God said to Moses, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, ‘I will give it to your offspring’” (Deuteronomy 34:4).
Israel, like every other nation on the earth, including all Arab states, does not affirm Jesus Christ as God, Messiah, and Savior, and is, therefore, not a covenant-keeping people in relation to God. Rejecting the Son of God is rebellion against the God of the covenant.

A non-covenant-keeping people — Jewish or Arab — does not have a divine right to hold the land of promise while they are living in rebellion against the God who promised it to an obedient people. “If you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples” (Exodus 19:5).
This does not mean that other nations have the right to molest Israel, nor Israel to molest her neighbors. Israel and the surrounding nations still have human rights among nations, though they have no divine right to claim the land while rejecting the Messiah.

A word limit, but you skipped over to add more words...

And those words you skipped over sort of buries the lead.

Not a great look...

But I’m not trying to sell anything like you are..

The New Testament prioritizes identity in Christ over ethnic origin or geopolitical maps. Yet the latter is what too many believers of a certain persuasion end up getting locked in, at the expense of the Gospel, and in favor of toxic idolatries.

All believers regardless of ethnic origin or locale are co-heirs in Christ by faith.

You rightly pasted the harsher reminders Piper has for those Christians who try to use the Bible to justify racism and war-mongering.

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